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In recent years, seed funding has become more formalized. Many of the folks on this list aren't "angels" in the classic sense of the word—i.e.individuals who became rich and now spray money around. This list includes early-stage VCs and other professional investors who make seed investments.

We should also note that we purposely did not include contact information for the early stage investors. If you can't hustle your way to meet one of these people, you probably don't deserve their money.

The Silicon Valley Angel 50 is the first installment of an annual guide SAI will be producing. It's going to get better with time.

To compile this list, we took hundreds of coffee meetings, took recommendations, and asked for survey responses. If your name isn't on it, don't take offense. Silicon Valley is a vibrant community and it is impossible to recognize everyone who's making it thrive. But we also can't include you if we don't know you exist.

We want to thank the readers, companies, investors, and executives who have taken time over the past few months to submit nominations and share information with us. We thank our colleague Andrea Huspeni for performing most of the background research. The names were compiled by Alyson Shontell, Jay Yarow and Nicholas Carlson.

Dave McClure, 500 Startups

Bio: Founding Partner at 500 Startups, an incubator program that invests seed funding in companies while also providing mentoring. McClure has been involved in the tech industry for some time with past stints at PayPal, Founders Fund and Simply Hired.

Bio: Co-founder of AVOS Systems, an online company that has Delicious, Mei.fm, and Zeen under its umbrella. Previously, Chen was the co-founder of YouTube, which he sold to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006.

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